COLONIA CINCO MIL, Brazil — The mildewing white church of one of Brazil's odder religions lies in the fringes of the Amazon rain forest, at the end of a long track of gooey red mud potholes that leads out of the city of Rio Branco.

The church no longer draws thousands of worshipers, as it did in the 1960s and '70s when hippies with suitcases in hand and mud-caked sandals slogged up the road. But for those in search of uniquely Amazonian salvation, there's nothing quite like Colonia Cinco Mil's Doctrine of Juramidam.

The religion, a combination of Amazon Indian, Catholic and African beliefs, centers on drinking Santo Daime, the sect's term for ayahuasca, an ancient purgative and hallucinogen used by Amazon Indian shamans. During the 1960s, the drug was enthusiastically adopted by Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg.

On church evenings, followers dressed in white--the women in sequined crowns and green aprons--toss back small crystal glasses of the reddish brew, a mixture of pounded jagube vine cooked with the leaves of the japuruna bush.

There's hymn singing and praises for Jesus Christ and Mother Nature in equal measure. There are frantic trips to the restroom. Then, within about a half-hour, most of the congregation swaying gently in the humid night tell of seeing colored lights or luminous snakes. Family members--some long dead--appear to chat, they say, and the forest itself comes to life, dancing.

"It's always different because each of our minds are different, no two alike," says Raimundo Carneiro, a longtime follower.

The service can last hours until the effects of the potion begin to wear off. Well after midnight, celebrants end the ceremony with three Our Fathers, three Ave Marias and a Save Mother Nature and then stagger off to bed.

In the southwest Amazon, where at least half the population is thought to have tried ayahuasca at some point in their lives, Juramidam seems a natural fit. The forest is a land of caboclos, people of mixed Indian and northeast immigrant rubber-tapper ancestry, and the blending of Catholicism with shamanism has strong appeal.

The religion got its start in 1930, created by Raimundo Irineu, a towering black man from Brazil's coast who came to the western Amazon to seek his fortune in rubber. The rubber boom soon went bust, however, and Irineu instead found work demarcating the new Brazilian border with Bolivia.

While in the woods he spent time learning from Indian shamans and underwent a long initiation with ayahuasca. During one experience, he said he saw a woman's face in the moon, and Clara, as he called her, laid out the tenets of Juradmidam.

Colonia Cinco Mil, created in 1975, was the first of Juramidam's colonies, originally home to 43 families living on nearly a thousand acres. In later years many followers established a new colony called Mapia, at the Bolivian border, and Colonia Cinco Mil--the name means Colony Five Thousand in Portuguese, for reasons no one seems to understand--fell into decades of quiet decay.

Today, just a handful of families live at the colony.

Santo Daime, it turns out, may be good for you in more than just spirit. Even some U.S. doctors concede the potion may help some people with paralysis and Parkinson's disease.

Colonia Cinco Mil has its own first aid post, where Santo Daime is the only medicine. Carneiro's now-deceased father cured everything from cancer to AIDS, his son insists, and the post will give any problem a try, though those who have faith seem to get better more often, Carneiro says.

The clinic draws a steady trickle of the desperately ill from as far away as Europe.

Adanizio Greco, a tall man with an evangelist's intensity, tells of arriving from Manaus addicted to drugs and looking for a new fix.

"I came here with a backpack and thought I'd find drugs here, too, but it turned out to be a cure," he said. After three cups of Santo Daime he passed out. When he woke up, he said, the drug cravings were gone.

"Now I believe in God in heaven and in all of nature that is paradise," he said, smiling serenely a dozen years later. The colony, he said, follows the teachings of Jesus Christ but "we're not interested in the Old Testament with all that stuff about Egypt," he said. "We're looking to the future."